Jeannie Campanelli is the Inner Confidence Coach. Jeannie coaches naturally giving people who lose their connection to themselves by focusing on others. She helps these people to find that sense of wholeness, aliveness, and serenity that comes from deeply knowing themselves, fully accepting the lightness and darkness of being human. living truly from essence, which is what inner confidence is all about.

Jeannie came to me for help in 2007, and she’s a great example of how doing foundational message work can play out in your business over time.

When Jeannie first came to me, she was describing herself as a life coach. Jeannie had a webpage and she was actually getting traffic from her webpage, and she was getting prospective clients from the webpage. But Jeannie herself wasn’t satisfied. She said: I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t like the website.

She’d been coaching for maybe five or six years and she really wanted to increase her client load.

The True Spirit of Jeannie’s Work

The first thing we did was define the True Spirit of her Work.

In this process, Jeannie got in alignment with why she was here. She started to see the overarching theme of all the work she’s done in her lifetime, and she came up with a theme that was so true to her that it has been guiding her over the last six years in her business.

She has this very different feeling about what it means to go out in the world and tell people what she does. In a funny way, Jeannie developed a new sense of inner confidence that really translated into some substantial growth in her business.

Jeannie had been a teacher, a consultant, a university lecturer. She said: As a therapist, as a lecturer, consulting, working with teachers and parents, underneath, it was always about self-esteem . I hadn’t realized that before we worked together, not so clearly.

So this is the True Spirit statement Jeannie put together:

The true spirit of my work is to spark the hearts of individuals to experience the inner confidence; the sense of wholeness, vitality, and serenity

that comes from deeply knowing oneself

while accepting the lightness and darkness of being human,

and living freely by standing in one’s truth.

More Focus Means Less Stress and More Clients

What Jeannie said happened for her as this new language came into focus was this:

It was a release in a sense that getting really clear takes away a lot of stress. It became very easy for me to write my blog or send out a newsletter, come up with titles, to come up with a program. Everything’s centered around that focus. I felt really good about it.

It just felt so clear that from that time on. Any time I had to fill out anything on the web, sending bios out, whatever.

Because my message was so clear, I found that when clients phoned me, they had already hired me from seeing everything that I so clearly put out there. They knew what I was about. I really didn’t have the traditional consultation that people do to attract that client. I just didn’t have that. I really got my ideal clients. They knew who they were, and they were ready. I never had to talk them into it. They felt the already knew me and knew what I was about. That continues to this day, actually.

That’s a huge thing for anyone who is a coach or a consultant. We often have people call us who want to find out if we can help them. How great is it when people who call you have already decided before they get on the phone with you that they want what you offer?

She went on to say:

Also, because it was so much my work, my own inner work, it was endlessly easy for me to relate to the clients, but also to write about- to come up with topics and so on. I knew this personally, so I could really put myself out there.

I love what Jeannie shares here because her insight into self-esteem and inner confidence isn’t just something she was trained in or taught by somebody else, but was something that came so deeply from her own personal journey.

One of the interesting things that Jeannie said is that once she got so clear on what her True Spirit was:

It wouldn’t be real for me to not to go forward with it. I couldn’t not put it out there once I got that clarity.

The truth is that until something comes fully into focus, you can feel lost and confused, it can be an intense place to be and it can make a huge difference to feel like someone’s holding your hand and guiding you. Saying “yes, yes, yes, you’ve got something.”

So much of writing is about clear thinking and mental clarity. Usually, when we struggle with the writing, most of the time it’s not because we don’t know how to write. It’s because we aren’t clear what the theme and what the story is that wants to come through.

Usually, when we struggle with the writing, most of
the time it’s not because we don’t know how to write.
It’s because we aren’t clear what the theme and
what the story is that wants to come through.

Notice how much more specific Jeannie’s story got. Instead of saying, “I’m a life coach, and I’m going to help you live a better life,” or whatever those common phrases are that we hear, she can now say “I’m here to help people who lose connection to themselves by focusing on others live their own life and have that sense of wholeness, aliveness, and serenity that comes from deeply knowing themselves, and fully accepting the lightness and darkness of being human.”

Jeannie’s True Wisdom

It’s often not enough to go out in the world and say, “I help you have better self-esteem,” it doesn’t move people or inspire them until you get more specific.

In the second stage of our work, Jeannie created what I call her True Wisdom. She developed six components that allow someone to have inner confidence. The six components that she articulated are:

• Self-claiming
• Self-knowing
• Self-connectedness
• Self-embracing
• Relating from self
• Contributing from self

Notice that Jeannie doesn’t lump all these elements into one mushy ball. These are really different threads that play into inner confidence.

And as we heard with Connie, Jeannie easily created a program based on this. She’s created an e-book based on this. She’s created workshops and retreats based on this content. She’s even considering doing a live event using this as the foundation.

Over the years, she’s altered it slightly she continues to do more and more training on this idea of inner confidence.

Using Your One Theme to Guide Your Continuing Education

One of the interesting things that Jeannie has done is that she has used her True Spirit to guide her choice of training. She is continuously investing in learning new tools to go deeper and deeper into inner confidence, to be more able to help others develop this.

That’s great because coaches can sometimes over-invest in training, or invest inappropriately in training. I love that Jeannie isn’t trying to become something different, but just continuously asks herself, “How can I do an even better job of delivering what I promise in my true spirit? How can I go deeper? How can I do a better job at this?”

You can hear in most of the stories I am sharing here that the True Spirit Statements are pretty big. They’re ambitious. They describe the bigger things that we want for other people, and for ourselves. Sometimes clients will say to me, “Well gosh. I don’t know if I’m really up to the task. I don’t know if I can do that.”

But what Jeannie really demonstrates is that she both knew that she was already doing this, she could do it, but she also set the bar for herself to continuously improve her toolkit and her skills for accomplishing this in her work.

Sustainable Business Growth

What were some of the nitty gritty results of Jeannie’s new clarity and new language?

We’ve already talked about how she started attracting the perfect clients that she adores working with, that they come to her already knowing they want to work with her.

Jeannie also developed all kinds of programs and products using the structure of her True Wisdom. And writing became so much easier for her. She said:

I kept my binder. I still do, actually keep my binder with all my information that I created with you on my desk.

But how did it affect the bottom line?

When Jeannie came to work with me, she said she hoped to increase her client load. Within a year of doing this work, she more or less doubled her client load and increased her income by more than 40%.

At first, Jeannie admitted she was kind of surprised that it didn’t happen faster. She had that impatience of, okay, I’ve done all this work, where are the clients?

But over the course of the year, she saw steady growth, growth that she has maintained. And of course, doubling your client load within a year, and maintaining that, is a pretty impressive shift.

You can read a sample of Jeannie’s writing at www.innerconfidencecoaching.com.